Square Enix is suing a group of 15 "Italian nationals" for leaking a preview build of Deus Ex: Human Revolution to torrent sites a couple of months ago, reports Kotaku. Word is: "As part of court filings issued last month in Washington, Square Enix accuse the fifteen of logging into the servers where the demo was hosted using the access information of an Italian games magazine (GMC), where they found the preview build of the game, copied it and uploaded it onto the internet."

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You might want to do a bit of research on reverse engineering and how memory dumps/footprints or analyzing file structures and formats etc. is going to take things to a whole new level for someone in the know.

I assume you're talking about cracking the game. From a game coding perspective, DX:HR doesn't do anything that other games haven't done before. Any competent programmer could create the same systems from scratch. As for cracking, as I mentioned before, DX:HR is using Steamworks and Steamworks has been cracked many, many times already. If DX:HR were using some brand new, revolutionary DRM system, you'd have a point. But it isn't using that. It's using a system that's already been consistently cracked in the past.

A head start is a head start and any serious game developer is going to burn mucho dinero even in just three months. I never said that anyone would code a full game in three months. Stop pulling stuff that I never said out of your ass, kthx.

Again, you don't actually need to play the leaked build to steal its ideas. All you have to do is read the previews and watch the official videos and that will give you a pretty good sense of how the game is designed and its mechanics implemented.

Also: The positive reception of the leak alone is a very valuable information asset for third parties (and thus a potential problem for Square Enix). It is true that other games have combined stealth, action and dialogue but some games worked for the audience and some games didn't. It seems like DXHR is going to be one of the working cases. That info alone is worth a lot because it's going to make copying the essentials much easier. I'm almost tempted to bet real money that some Eastern European or Russian devs are all over the DXHR leak already to produce one of their infamous clones.

Deus Ex, STALKER, System Shock and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines also received critical acclaim from many people. However, how many clones of those games do we see? Truth is, nobody is going to start making DX:HR-clones until the game sells at least 3 million units. If they do start making clones, is that necessarily a bad thing? Hybrid games are still pretty uncommon and I'd much rather see more of those instead of more CoD-clones.